Ron Monsma received his BA in Fine Arts at Indiana University South Bend and has been an instructor of drawing and painting at the university since 1997. His work has been recognized with numerous awards and is represented in many private and corporate collections across the United States.

Professor Monsma’s work was included in 100 Artists of the Midwest, Pure Color, the Best of Pastel, 20th Century Indiana Landscape Painters, in the Chinese book Contemporary American Oil Painting. In 2008 he won the Jack Richeson Best of Show Award in the 9th Annual Pastel 100 competition sponsored by The Pastel Journal.
Since 1990 Professor Monsma’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The Pastel Journal, International Artist Magazine, Art News Magazine and The Artist’s Magazine.
Professor Monsma has conducted workshops in Finland and the United States and recently taught in Florence, Italy. (ronmonsma.com)

Friday

Yves Brayer traveled widely to Spain, Italy, Greece, the US, Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Japan and Russia, trying to capture the light and colors of each country. He was interested in the techniques of copper plate engraving and lithography and produced illustrations for editions of such authors as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Claudel. He also created murals and wall ornamentations, tapestry cartoons, maquettes, sets, and costumes for the Théâtre Français and the operas of Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Avignon.
In 1957, Yves Brayer was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He had also been president of the Salon d'Automne for five years.(wikipedia)

Duncan Phillips, an art collector and critic, one of the founders of The Phillips Collection, visited Sorolla in Madrid in the beginning of 1910s. He published his article Sorolla: the Painter of Sunlight in 1913. Here's a few excerpts from the article found on archive.org

"At his best Sorolla combines truth and beauty in a very exceptional way. His distinctive achievement is the effect of sunlight on white - white skin, white sails, white dresses, white walls. His whites are never twice alike, but they speak vividly of various sorts of surfaces and edges. There are no splatter-dashes to offend the sensitive, but from Monet or from experience he has learned that a slight mixture with pure white pigment of yellow or vermilion for parts in light, and of violet or blue for parts in shadow, will produce the illusion of air that sparkles with sunbeams. His sunlight on darker tones is equally successful; on the brown skins of little naked boys that race up and down his Valencian sea beaches, and on the orange tress and flame-red soil of his Andalusian orchards."

JOAQUÍN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, A Walk on the Beach 1909

"Now Claude Monet painted sunligght so scientifically compounded of solar beams that it made us hot around the collar, and dazzled our eyes, Yet he never made us feel, a s i hope we all had felt on summer days, that this is the best of all possible worlds and that the golden sun is chiefly responsible for its being so nice. That is Sorolla's sentiment. he is a lyric poet, one of the familiar kind who goes about singing."
"It is the joy that Sorolla puts into his pictures that makes their sunshine so irresistible."

Joaquin Sorolla Y Bastida, Under the Awning at Zarauz Beach

"....This subjective strain makes his realism intimately impressionistic. It made me eager to know the man, to shake him by the hand. And so I took the opportunity at Madrid last sprin of visiting the painter in his new home. To my complete satisfaction he was just like his pictures. Whimsical, unconventional, jovial, kindly, the French would call him "Bon garcon." It is a familiar type in the studios of the world. But how few of them have the genius of this little Spaniard!"

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, My Wife and Daughters in the Garden

"Sorolla was a charming host, putting my companions and myself at once at our ease by his almost boisterous familiarity, assuring us that although we were not painters, yet we were Americans, and therefore easy for him to like and understand. He spoke with enthusiasm of his friends in America, of his new commission to decorate the Hispanic Museum at New York with mural paintins, of his admiration for the American spirit, his belief that from us shall come the great art of the future."

".... at the time of my visit, (in his studio) was a still larger canvas upon which he was yet working; a picture of three women in sun-flecked, summery dresses of white and pink, stretched out full length on the sun bathed grass in poses eloquent of utter, irresistible relaxation, once more as if seen from above. I fairly gasped at the daring of this point of view and Sorolla laughed and stroked his hands and exclaimed, "C'est terrible, ca" - which being interpreted meant - the illusion is quite overpowering, as I wished it to be."

La Siesta, 1911

"But I was all the more eager to remember the exquisite sweetness and gaiety of the man who could carry his sunshine about with him in his heart."

Joaquin Sorolla Y Bastida, Elena and Maria the Painter's Daughters on Horseback in Valencian Period Costumes

"On the wall of his library hangs a print of one of Vermeer's serene interiors. Pointing to it he said significantly, "le plus moderne des anciens." If Vermeer had lived in our free and frolicsome epoch of art his brush work would probably have been as big and brave as Sorolla's, and if Sorolla had been of the later seventeenth century in Holland, he might have been as "exquisite" as Vermeer."

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks at Javea

"...when I praised the beauty of his house and garden, he smiled as if remembering former doubts and compunctions about the realization of this expensive dream, and said very simply, "One can live only once. Let us be happy while we may."

Wednesday

Richard Sorrell was born in 1948, the son of Alan Sorrell, the historical draughtsman and painter, and Elizabeth Sorrell, the watercolourist.
He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, having also attended Walthamstow Art School and Kingston College of Art. In 1975, he was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society, served there as Vice President (2002-2005), later he was elected President (2006-09). (richardsorrell.co.uk)

"Janel Hart Eleftherakis is a New England based artist who was born in Germany and grew up in Miami, Florida. Janel presents a collection of oil-sepia paintings that recall the glamour of the 40s and 50s, encompassing a sultry,smokey style.This series is a retrospective of an era of sophistication and alluring charm,evoking memories of a bigone time." (saatchiart.com),
artist's site ArtByJanel.com

Born in Germany, Buehr moved to Chicago with his family in the 1880s.
Young Karl worked as a night watchman at the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied later and taught for many years.
Married to his student Mary Hess, Buehr moved with his family to France in 1905 with the help of a wealthy patron.

The Flower Girl

He started spending summers in Giverny after 1909. "...he is already as devoted to the little village as its older inhabitants. Of late years he has sought inspiration in southern Italy, but Giverny has already begun to exercise its fascinating spell over his work. Mr. Buehr is a man of rare feeling and perseption. His beautiful canvases plainly show him to be quite as much the poet and the dreamer as the painter. Especially, too, mention should be made of the work of his wife, Mary Hess Buehr, whose charming miniatures are so well known". (World Today, Volume 20, January 1911).

In Giverny Buehr met other renowned expatriate American Impressionist artists such as Frederick Frieseke and Richard Miller. Buehr probably met Monet there as his daughter and Monet's granddaughter were playmates, according to the painter's son.